Pachomios of Chios

Our father among the saintsPachomios of Chios was a monastic of the nineteenth century. He founded the Monastery of the Holy Fathers on the island of Chios. His feast day is October 14.

Life

In 1840, Panagiotis Arellas was born in the village of Elatia on the Island of Chios in the Aegean Sea. A seventeen year old young man from a farming family, he traveled to Constantinople to work. There, he became involved in an incident that resulted in his imprisonment in a Turkish prison that was virtually a death sentence, especially for a Christian. Panagiotis' deep religious faith and subsequent miraculous events in his life resulted in his gaining his freedom after which he traveled to the Holy Land.

In the Holy Land, Panagiotis entered the Holy Monastery of St. Savas where he was tonsured a monk with the name Pachomios, after the great desert ascetic [[Pachomius the Great|Pachomio. He was twenty-two years old. He returned to Chios in 1865 and founded the Monastery of the Holy Fathers on the site of an earlier monastic community of ascetics.